Web based on-line forums

Forums allow people to discuss a variety of topics online using a web browser. Openbravo ERP support forums and Openbravo POS support forums provide a means to communicate with community members and project enthusiasts located all over the world. People discuss Openbravo features, configuration and installation issues or development questions among others.

Policy for creating new forums

Any user can ask Openbravo to create a new on-line forum. Our policy for creating on-line forums is:

The forum should be only used to discuss issues related to Openbravo POS and ERP projects.

A forum can be opened for a specific language or region.

A forum can be split into other forums to reduce traffic and give more focus on a specific subject.

You can request new forums to collaborate@openbravo.com.

Recommendations

Before answering a question check if it is explained in Openbravo community Wiki and instead of giving a full explanation give the user the URL that points to documentation that answers his or her question. This includes pointing users to our public roadmap when they ask about future development plans or release dates.

Get to the point quickly. In your subject and in the first paragraph, clearly describe what problem you are having. Don't use "Help me!" as your subject.

Don't create multiple topics for the same question. This makes it harder for people to find the solution as only one topic may be answered. Posting the same questions to multiple forums is called 'Cross Posting' and is also not going to help.

Give all the details. After describing the problem, describe what version you're running and what module or page you are having a problem with. If relevant, describe what platform or database you're using, and paste detailed error log messages. If you have screen shots, post them on issue trackers or upload them to your site and provide a link.

Before answering a question check if it is answered in our public FAQ. If it is, give the FAQ URL to the user pointing where the answer is instead of answering the question.

After answering a question, if you think that it can be turned into a general question, consider taking some time and adding the question and its answer to our public FAQ.

Quite often people describe behaviours of the application that are clearly bugs. Do not let that precious information to get lost in the forums; ask the user to file a bug with all the details that they can provide. If the user does not file a bug report, consider doing it yourself.

If you detect a spam message or a highly offensive message contact Openbravo administrators (email address wiki at openbravo.com)

Openbravo IRC channels

Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, is the precursor to instant messaging and chat rooms like those found on Yahoo! and innumerable other web sites. It is one of the best ways to get help fast but it is also a way to hang out and become part of the Openbravo community.

As many other open source projects, Openbravo has its own discussion channel that allows real time communication between the different community members where they can exchange quickly ideas, doubts and projects.

English language channel

Server: irc.freenode.net

Channel name: #openbravo

Spanish language channel

Server: irc.freenode.net

Channel name: #openbravo-es

Software

There are many open source clients. These are some of the most popular ones, available for Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and *BSD:

Statistics

Chat Meetings

24/7 IRC for developers

This is an offer for all developers. Openbravo has a dedicated machine to be used as IRC client. So that the machine stays connected to IRC 24/7 and you can connect to the machine whenever you want. Generally this is achieved using a text based IRC client (e.g. irssi), SSH and a program that allows you detaching and reattaching to a terminal session (e.g.screen, dtach).

This means you can stay connected to #openbravo and the #openbravo-xx channels forever, and connect whenever you want to check and answer the messages.

Request

Those who are interested should send an e-mail to staff.rm at openbravo dot com, specifying the desired user name for the SSH access and attaching a public SSH key. If you don't have one or don't know that it is, perform the following steps to generate one:

Open a terminal with your everyday user. And then generate the key, specifying a passphrase you only know.